As computers took over my world, I used to curse Bill Gates for bringing us windows with all the different ways to accomplish the same thing. I was such a linear person! In those days, and now, if you asked a couple of people how to do something on the computer, you’d get a different answer from each person, and they might all be wrong.

Then President Bush brought us more choice in the Medicare system with Part A and Part B. I didn’t know how rewarding and good any extra choice could be. I hadn’t figured that out yet.

I used to have good days and bad days. I assumed that was just the way things were. Then I found out the good days weren’t just assigned by the universe. Good days are choices. I feel good or bad because I choose to do so! Just like Karen Hopkins reports, it is uplifting just to know I have the choice. I choose to feel good, but once in a while I might just choose to feel bad. When I make a choice like that, it will feel good not bad, simply because I am free to make the choice.

My lucky hat is not lucky because it was sprinkled with fairy dust. It is lucky because I decided it was lucky. Good luck is the meaning I choose to associate with my hat. When I wear it I expect good luck and that is what I get. When I spot my lucky hat before I go out, I feel good because I can choose to wear it or not. All of these choices are good choices.

You don’t have to make yourself feel good all the time. Just stop choosing to make yourself feel bad. Bask in the freedom that you have to choice your own fate, your own course of action.

When you walk forward don’t limit your vision to the two diverging paths that you come to, know that you can choose to go back, or you can go off path. Your choices are unlimited. You can feel good about all those choices just because you have them!

Now when I use a windows program, I don’t curse Microsoft for forcing me to make a decision. I am grateful for the choices. Any choice is a good choice!

Years ago, I read a study done with fruit pickers. Some fruit pickers did better the first few days of a harvest because they found a few good trees and went back to them every day. Other pickers went to different trees every day. They did well, but not as well as the first group that kept exploiting the best areas over and over.

Eventually, the first group picked their favorite trees clean. Their production began to taper off. The more venturesome group of pickers began to out pick the first group. Before the end of the harvest the first group could barely find anything at all as they made their repetitive circle through their favorite areas. The more venturesome pickers continued to find fruit to the very end.

I learned from the fruit pickers that doing things differently, making different choices just for the sake of choice can put me in places that my old rigid self would never have gone. By choosing a narrow range of travel, I had restricted the number of opportunities I was exposed to . When I trained my eye to see more choices and made those choices, my opportunities expanded in ways beyond my imagination.

My luck is directly proportionate to the number of opportunities I expose myself to. The more diverse my choices, the more diverse my opportunity. The greater I choose, the luckier I get.

More choice means more options and greater satisfaction, but fear can create the illusion of excessive choice. The stress of indecision can overwhelm a person to the point of paralysis, anxiety, and failure. It can lead to clinical depression. All of this can happen to those who choose to fear. Choose the adventure of freedom and choice ; reject the choice of fear.

Choosing to appreciate and take advantage of all the choices around me was a good choice. Now when I face a new choice, I look for even more choices. The more I look the more I find. Any choice is a good choice, the more the better.

The internet wires whisper a one percent transaction tax solution. Before it has had a chance to even be considered, it has been carried by broomstick from computer to computer replete with ready made conclusions as to how it is a horrible idea. No personal consideration is needed for the one percent tax solution.

Uncle Sam wants your money!

The usual gossips have sent out their fabricated emails bearing false witness against the President and Congress. Now, I’m no fan of either, but I have been supporting a transaction tax to replace the income tax for 30 years. The gossips falsely warn that Obama and Nancy Pelosi are trying to secretly put though a one percent transaction tax that will apply to everything and make you poor. If the bankers can get people to associate this tax with unpopular politicians they can keep getting richer while the working class gets poorer. Obama and Pelosi live in the same back pocket that Gingich and most of the other republicans live in.

As usual, they get it completely wrong. The continued ignorance of the uninformed masses keep intelligent people from finding solutions to the massive debt that these same people have supported through the years—lower taxes AND increased spending. This one percent transaction tax solution is so scary to the bankers that they want to poison the
grass roots from which it springs.

There is a one percent type solution offered but unfortunately the only attention it is getting is from the gossips and slander mongers! Read about it from a reliable source: http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/debtfree.asp

The closest thing to a one percent tax solution comes from Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa). He has something he calls The Debt Free America Act. (H.R. 4646) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-b

The way I understand it, this tax would replace all federal income taxes and all the book keeping nightmares that go with it. Individuals earning $125,000 or less would pay the tax but get a credit equal to 1% of their income.

It would impose taxes on all transactions except the buying and selling of stock. Retail and Wholesale transactions would be taxed. Tangible and Intangible financial transactions would be taxed. You move or spend the money, you owe the tax.

With all the politicians in the bankers pockets, this has zero chance of passing. With the gossips mongers letting the exploiters frame the discussion and warning all about something they don’t understand, it will continue to be ignored.

All I’ll say about this is that people who do real work and earn real dollars put their money in Federal Reserve Member banks.

When a capitalist deposits a cash dollar, not a borrowed dollar, it is a real dollar representing a dollars worth of work or investment profit. The bank can keep a dime on reserve and loan out 90 cents, except when that money is re-deposited they can again loan it out. They keep loaning the dollar until it becomes $10 in debt. This is with a 10% reserve. The reserve amounts vary from 8 to 14%. In case of emergency, the reserve can be reset to 100%.

This is where all the money that we loan third world countries comes from. When a capitalist earns a dollar it has a current purchase power of a dollar. The bank creates 10 dollars and spews them into the market via the least discrete spenders in the world.

When you get ready to spend your dollar, there are 10 other dollars in the hands of people who did not earn their dollars competing to buy what you want to buy. Come easy, go easy, they are often willing to pay more than you are willing to pay. The price of the item goes up; the value of your hard earned dollar goes down.

I don’t really know the structure of Fattah’s bill, it is way early in the discussion of these types of things. For my part of the discussion, I just want to make sure that all banks have to pay this tax as they create the phony money that destroys the value of my savings.

If I deposit a real dollar in the bank, I would have to pay 1%. I can live with that if it is the only tax I have to pay, another when I write a check for that money. The nice part is that the bank would have to pay 10 cents on that dollar as they multiply it by 10 as they do. Also, the people who borrow the phoney money and quick spend it against me later will have to pay an additional 10 cents. That’s 21 cents of tax revenue from my dollar, only 1 cent comes from me.

Before you repeat the propoganda that flows through the email, think about the repercussions. After being properly vetted, this could be the solution we are looking for so we can get back to work making the money that keeps our country going.

Gingrich defends job creators like Citigroup. He and other republicans (not all) love these so called job creators. People need to focus on the truth. Citigroup is cutting 4500 jobs.

Gingrich defends "Job Creators"

Gingrich and others crony capitalists on the payroll of the too big to fail monster banks call it class warfare! They like to talk about the 1% at the top of the privledged income stream as job creators, but let’s take a look who these Washington insiders are defending.

Citigroup, who gave Newt Gingrich $16,000 in 1997-9198, is cutting 4,500 jobs worldwide according to Chief Executive Vikram Pandit.

Instead of creating jobs, Citigroup is destroying 4500 jobs!

They will take a record $400 million charge, reducing any taxes they would have paid without the layoffs. That’s 2% of their workforce. This is what entrenched Republicans call, “Job Creators.” Remember them! They are protected by people who call themselves conservative free marketers. There is nothing free market about protecting government created persons, corporations, with tax loopholes that give them a pass where smaller business has to pay.

This website promotes real money making, not the free presses of the federal reserve system.

Citi Group job creators (or job destroyers) join other banks that have cut more than 120,000 jobs as they continue to hoard money given to them in the bailouts….money they were supposed to loan out.

Unlike the crony capitalists, I do not like free credit using phony dollars from the FED. It destroys the value of real dollars earned by hard working people and true capitalists. We can’t have real class warfare without holding these government protected monsters accountable. 2500 arrested Occupiers, but not one arrested bank crook!

Citi rival Bank of America is cutting 30,000 jobs.

I don’t mind making business tax competitive with foreign companies, but remove the loopholes, first. Whatever we give to these guys, we need to make simple, open, and give to every individual…not just the big guys! Penny capitalists create jobs when they get to keep their profits as the too big to fail guys are given advantages that allow them to run rough shod over the little business people.

Citigroup received 45 billion as their part of the 700 billion dollar government bailout.

Recently, these one percenters agreed to pay $285 million to settle civil fraud charges that it mislead buyers of complex packages of bad loans just as the housing market was starting to collapse.

Republicans and Democrats need to stop talking about the “job creators” until jobs are actually created.

Does Newt defend Citigroup because they create jobs or because they are likely to give him his share of that 700 Billion dollars tax payer money again in the future?

The transformation of labor into money is a learned process. If you want to accumulate money, you must

apply your labor to the acquisition of wealth. Applying labor is an art rather than a science. Where you apply your labor determines the return you will receive. With the same expense of labor a fisherman can get more fish out of good water than he can in bad.

How you apply your labor also determines your return. You can push against a stone wall and wear yourself out and yet never move the wall. If you find a weak spot in the wall and apply a tool with leverage, then the wall may move. How you apply your labor is important.

In a highly sophisticated market economy, the division of labor is important to understand. You can not

acquire wealth efficiently doing all the work yourself. You must purchase the labor of those more efficient than you at a price that returns more than your expense.

Your labor should be distributed among the various labors in such a way as to make the cumulative cost of all labor (including your own) less than the price you will receive for your production.

This is the trick to making money. It is complex…but simple. If you are skilled in making the decisions of an entrepreneur, you will make money. If you make bad decisions, you will lose.

You must first labor to acquire capital savings. As your capital grows, you will have the means to purchase the labor of others more efficient than you. The division of labor allows the efficiency of your production to grow exponentially beyond your wildest imagination.

In the beginning, you can develop capital with little more than your own labor. As your capital grows, you can grow your production of wealth by purchasing the labor of others in areas where they are more efficient than you.

If you make a mistake and pay labor more than you can receive for that labor, then you will have to make up the loss in expense by adding even more of your own labor to the project or the next project to make up your loss.

Just as a pilot steadily adjusts his course toward his destination, so will the entrepreneur adjust his decisions and labor toward the end of making as much money as he can in the most efficient manner.

It is not a single action, but an ongoing process. Goals must be set, plans must be implemented and results observed. When the results are positive, they need be repeated and improved. When they are negative, they need to be adjusted to a more positive result.

The driver of an automobile constantly adjusts the steering wheel. A new driver makes a thousand decisions as he adjusts the wheel, but with experience instinct and skill take over. The decisions are still made but they are more sub-conscious than conscious, more instinctive and intuitive than decisive.

Just as we learn to drive a car, we must learn to apply labor, and later capital to the pursuit of money. It will become easier in time. The important thing is to take the first steps; get moving! The money will follow as our skills develop.

It doesn’t require genius. Plenty of wealthy people are dull witted. It requires perseverance and work.

I see signs that the United States is giving up its place as industrial leader of the world. I see a lack of vision, and a decrease in employment opportunity vs. reward for that work for more and more people. As third world nations emerge, they bring with them an eager workforce eager to work for less than Americans. This would require great vision and imagination plus a concern for our own workforce inorder to remain competitive. I don’t see any of this.

The rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Wages are going down. In the past, a good job could make one rich, but it is becoming less and less important to the goal of wealth.
Even in the most economically depressed countries, skill and discipline in buying and selling can make one wealthy. So this is our goal.

You don’t have to have a lot of money to start. Find something as common as aluminum cans, sell it as scrap, then use that money to buy something cheap that you can sell for more. Sell something that you don’t need and use that as seed money. You can grow your way into large deals so long as you remember your cost includes acquisition expense, handling, transportation, and delivery costs.

Adjust your margins to fit your experience. Your margin is the spread between what you buy it for and what you sell it for, including all expenses. Be honest in your accounting. Low price items require larger margins than expensive items.

For thousands of years traders have made fortunes moving merchandise to the far reaches of the world, but today, you can reach almost anywhere electronically in a moment. Ebay and other auction sites like that make the whole world your market.

If you buy at the right price, your item will almost sell itself. Buy cheap! Sell dear!

Research what people are wanting. Trends change. If you acquire something but the market shifts before you sell it, you’ll lose money. Don’t agonize over bad deals. Mark your item down and move it out. Learn something then move forward to the next deal.

See what is hot on ebay, or 50.lycos.com, or ubercool.com. Buy and sell what you are most interested in and know about. If a search on ebay shows lots of auctions with no bids, pick something else. Do a wildcard search on ebay for “a” or “the” in price ranges equal to the range of capital you are comfortable risking. Look through those items for something that sparks your interest.

Develop your market sense; use your intuition. The better you are at picking items in demand the faster you complete your deals.

How to price your items? The market prices your items for you. What you pay for it doesn’t matter. What matters is what the market is willing to bear. If you pay too much you lose. If you pay very little, the profit is yours. Price according to you what the market is willing to pay. You want to acquire at a price low enough to allow you to price slightly below market.

You have more control over what you pay for something than what you sell it for. You can’t sell it for what you want; you sell it for what someone wants to pay. When you are buying, you are the one in control. Make sure you buy cheap!

As you are building your capital, your time is a consideration but you can’t always price your time when building investment capital. As you grow more skilled and your investments larger, you can build your time spent into the deal.

Don’t overbuy! Consider your available storage space and work with what you have. Turn your inventory! Get rid of your mistakes, even if you have to give them away. Mistakes staring you in the eye erode your confidence. Get them out of your sight and move forward.

Establish a market protocol. Maybe you’ll try to sell large ticket items locally through a classified ad. If that doesn’t work list it on ebay. If that doesn’t work try a free listing on craigslist. Lower the price until it sells. Develop backup markets. Backup your backup. If you lose money, learn something from your mistake and be more careful on the next deal.

There comes a time when we need to recognize and embrace the positive power of negative thinking. Are you in a Positive rut? Have you been reciting afirmations without any of the promised results? Are you beginning to have doubts about all that positive motivation? Is it possible that it works for others but not you? Maybe you’ve learned how to put a positive front on a deep seated negative conviction that you can’t get what you want?

The power of positive action has become so important in western culture, that few would challenge it. How about the power of negative action? There is magic in a positive thought, but what magic can be found in a negative thought?

Negative thinking is just the exact opposite of positive thinking, right? Maybe! Maybe not. It depends on your angle of approach. You can use negative actions in very positive ways. The fact that so few consider it, means it is a tool of surprise. No one expects it; therefore it can be even more powerful than positive action.

Letters From Grandma showing power of negative action

In art, an artist can use negative space to intensify the positive image. Negative space in a painting is the part of the paper or canvas that is blank. Notice in my example here how Michael Atkinson uses the negative space to suggest fog, snow, mist, sand or whatever the imagination can conceive. The white space is unrestrained in meaning. It is suggestive. It hints only enough to get the juices of the viewer flowing. It is dynamic and lives in the viewer as well as the artist. It makes a much larger statement than a rigid fully contained detail. When the detail is explicit, it may or may not suit the viewer’s taste, but when left to the mind of the viewer, it will be filled in exactly as the viewer wants it to be. It becomes a conversation of visual art rather than a lecture.

Art is never distinct from life or business. It always reflects life. Negative action in life and business can be similar to the experience we have in art.

The Power of negative action is simply the power of not doing of something. It is common in negotiation for a nervous bargainer to talk too much. While the more experience negotiator remains silent, the nervous one will tell everything he knows, trying to fill the uncomfortable void. Silence is a negative action. Like the white space in a painting, silence can say whatever the listener wants it to say. A highly skilled negotiator should learn to feel comfort in silence. It gives one strength. When two equally skilled negotiators meet, each allowing the other to fill the void with information and nervous talk, a smile soon crosses the face of each as they learn to respect the skill of the other. A stronger bond can result from silence between the skilled than could ever result in two novices talking over each other and going nowhere.

There is also a place for negative action in the budget. It is easy to throw money at a problem, but sometimes it is better to not spend money. Sometimes it is better to avoid the expense by doing nothing than to make a problem worse by spending and spending and spending. The United States Government could take a lesson here. No action is often better than bad action.

I tried to quit smoking for decades. If I asked anyone, smoker or non-smoker if they thought my trying to quit was a positive action, they would all agree. It was a positive action, but it always had a negative result. I always started smoking again.

Too tired to take on another “stop smoking campaign”, I just decided not to smoke anymore. I didn’t have to do anything. In fact, after the decision, as long as I did nothing else, I was done. It was that simple. It may sound crazy, but that was seven years ago; I’ve never smoked another cigarette since. The most fantastic thing is I had to do nothing at all to accomplish what I had failed in all those years to trying this and that to no avail.

It was the power of negative action.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I’m almost 30 lbs overweight. I’ve been eating all the right foods, with the occasional bowl of ice cream, or large pizza, or sugary soft drink to celebrate. The more I celebrated my diet actions, the more excess weight I’ve put on. I can’t go on this way. I’m tired. I think I’ll just quit eating and see what happens. Let nature do all the work. Okay, I’ll eat a little, but mostly I’ll just be lazy and do nothing and see what happens. I’ll give negative action one more test and see if it will work on my eating problem the same way it did for my smoking problem.

The sad thing is that it seems such an astonishing concept. Negative Action? To lose weight, just don’t eat. It seems too easy to be true. Positive thinking is still important, but we need a little balance in our life. We need the power of negative thinking. We need to utilize intelligent negative action.

One more great thing about negative action is that we can add a lot of good negative action to our agenda without crowding out the positive actions. Most of us have more on our ‘to do” list than we can possibly get done. We can add all the new negative things to our list and they will take up zero time except for the time it takes to write them down and moniter them. We don’t have to do anything, just do nothing and in about 21 days we can call it a habit and mark it as done.

So much attention is placed on positive thinking in our modern culture, we lose the power of negative thinking because we don’t consider it. What a mistake?

I tried for 30 years to quit smoking. I failed so many times, I was disgusted with myself. One day, I decided to take another approach. Instead of quitting which is a positive action that requires me to do something and persist with it forever, I decided to just not smoke anymore. Whew! The thought of that overwhelms me. I didn’t have to do anything. All I had to do was not smoke! As long as I did nothing, I was finished with tobacco.

The same is true of losing weight. Diets are hard. We have to count calories, watch what we eat, when we eat it, and how much we exercise. If we just stop eating, we will lose weight!

For every positive thought that has value, there can be an inverse application of that value when considered from another angle. For every positive action, there is an equal and opposite negative action.

Never think that some term is not subject to change. All things are negotiable, and everything worth doing in life demands negotiation. As your skill improves you’ll want to stay in control of all things. That doesn’t mean it won’t be wise to let some things be determined by the will of others. It means you decide when the other person has his way.

If you do it well, those times will serve your interest and keep your negotiation partner feeling very good about him. Win/win negotiation is very much about being able to get what you want and giving the other side what they want as well.

All things are negotiable.

You can use persuasion to convince them that what is good for you is exactly what they want. Negotiation is moving them to your position.

Negotiate hard, but then give back what needs to be given back. When you give back concessions the other side has already made it puts you in control and it also puts you in their camp. It makes you a full partner!

You want your partner to feel you give back out of concern and never weakness. The moment you sense they perceive weakness, is the moment to stop giving.

You can and should negotiate even the smallest of terms. I have had store clerks agree to accept less for single purchases scanned with a scanner. If I went through with those deals, I’m sure the difference would have come out of their own pocket. A smile and a giveback are appropriate here, but it is great practice to know the control is mine.

Explore and experiment with your negotiations but keep in mind long term objectives are more important than the short term.

An old proverb says, “You can sheer a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once!”

Keep your customer and your source for the next deal.

Keep your reputation; be firm but fair.

Don’t be too easy.

Never kick a negotiating partner when he is down.

The video below is very entertaining. Watch it twice! The first time just enjoy it! The second time, pay attention to the skilled way the negotiator gets to the deal he wants. He is persistent and he is effective.

Everything is negotiable

Never think that some term is not subject to change. Everything is negotiable, and everything worth doing in life demands negotiation. As your skill improves you’ll want to stay in control of all things. That doesn’t mean it won’t be wise to let some things be determined by the will of others. It means you decide when the other person has his way.

If you do it well, those times will serve your interest and keep your negotiation partner feeling very good about him. Win/win negotiation is very much about being able to get what you want and giving the other side what they want as well.

You can use persuasion to convince them that what is good for you is exactly what they want. Negotiation is moving them to your position.

Negotiate hard, but then give back what needs to be given back. When you give back concessions the other side has already made it puts you in control and it also puts you in their camp. It makes you a full partner!

You want your partner to feel you give back out of concern and never weakness. The moment you sense they perceive weakness, is the moment to stop giving.

You can and should negotiate even the smallest of terms. I have had store clerks agree to accept less for single purchases scanned with a scanner. If I went through with those deals, I’m sure the difference would have come out of their own pocket. A smile and a giveback are appropriate here, but it is great practice to know the control is mine.

Explore and experiment with your negotiations but keep in mind long term objectives are more important than the short term.

An old proverb says, “You can sheer a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once!”

• Keep your customer and your source for the next deal.
• Keep your reputation; be firm but fair.
• Don’t be too easy.
• Never kick a negotiating partner when he is down.

The video below is very entertaining. Watch it twice! The first time just enjoy it! The second time, pay attention to the skilled way the negotiator gets to the deal he wants. He is persistent and he is effective.

Finally, for an in depth look consider this. We are a compensated affiliate.

Some blogs follow, some do not! Blogs that follow appreciate the two way value of a conversation. Those with something to say need not waste their time with blogs that do not want to listen or allow their readers a chance to voice their own opinion.

There have always been conversations about money. Ever since man first began using pretty shells to trade between one cave and another, people have been exchanging ideas on how to achieve wealth.

Now that we have the internet, the conversations take place across great distances. Once only the most adventuresome merchants learned the new secrets of acquisition from far away places, but today we can travel almost anywhere electronically.

The old media was a one way event. The printed book, newspaper, or even the noble handbill was the work of one distributed to the many. There was no interaction unless the reader decided to publish his own opinion.

With the internet, one can participate in the global discussion simply by reading a blog and leaving a comment.

There are some old dogs that are used to doing all the talking. They don’t want to listen. They want to tell the world what to do and have the world listen without interruption. That’s nice, but I’ll have as little to do with that as possible.

I’m not interested in blogs that do not allow comment. I have a voice and I have ears to hear others. My comments will be open and the blogs I read will have their comments open as well.

Some bloggers do not want to share the reputation of their blog with their readers. They block the search engines from following the comments of their readers. I prefer reading blogs that allow and encourage the search engines to follow. I allow it and I expect others to do the same.

There are directories that list blogs that “do follow.” I rely on those directories to find the blogs I read. Give these blogs a try!

A good beggar can make over a hundred thousand per year working less than forty hours a week. I once circled the block to give money to a man with a little girl beside him. The sign said, “have job in Tulsa, need gas to get there.” I gave him a twenty dollar bill, but in the time it took to circle back I saw three others drive by and hand him folding money. If he got twenty from each of them, that would be a hundred dollars in less than five minutes.

Begging is one of the highest paid professions with the lowest prestige!

The worst beggars are the winos and drug addicts. In their chemical stupor, they only beg, or pan handle long enough to get a fix. They never accumulate any money. They usually won’t even waste money for food. For them begging is a means to slow suicide. You can’t help them until they decide they want to be helped. They are usually dead men walking.

I undestand why some people beg. I don’t have a problem with someone that finds themselves so down and out that begging is the only way they can get a hand back up. I’d rather see them sell a little something, like a pencil, or a flower, or better a shoe shine. See how that progresses from begging to a genuine service that we could use more of in the world.

Give money to a beggar; feed him for a meal. Teach a beggar to sell and you feed him for a lifetime.